Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Roberto Rossellini | Germania anno zero (Germany, Year Zero)

Superficially,
the third film of Roberto Rossellini’s “war series,” Germany, Year Zero, seems to the most loosely episodic and open-ended
of these works. But actually, the seemingly formless street ramblings of the
film’s young hero, 12-year-old Edmund Kohler
(Edmund
Moeschke), are tightly interwoven with events that come to symbolize both the
moral corruption of the German people and their inabilities to come to terms
for their recent Nazi past.

It is the fact that Rossellini puts
nearly the entire weight of these events on the shoulders of his young lead (a
boy he felt looked very much like his own son, Romano, who had recently died at
age 9 an appendicitis attack, and to whom the film is dedicated) is perhaps
what made many critics of the day find his movie to be sentimental and
melodramatic. Certainly the determined symbolic heft of the events that occur
in Edmund’s wanderings suggest that the filmmaker was clearly moving away from
his neo-realist roots. This is a picture with a pre-determined statement, not a
depiction of real, everyday events.

Yes, this is a street movie, filled with
young boys and girls, peddlers and pimps, thieves and gang-members; yet their
various encounters with the young boy are not accidental, but representative of
the fragility of post-War German culture, if you can even define the
free-for-all struggle for survival in the bomb-pocked landscape as representing
any culture at all.

Edmund is forced onto the streets
because his other family members have all become unable to cope. His father
(Ernst Pittschau) is sickly and gradually starving to death; the only good days
for his family is when he gets temporarily moved into a hospital, where he is
well-fed and they have a bit more of whatever they can daily scare together to
share with one another.

The boy’s brother, Karl-Heinz (Franz-Otto
Krüger), dare not even go out, since, having fought “up to the last moment” in
the same neighborhood, he has determined not even register and is fearful of
being arrested. Had he registered, at least, the family might have been allowed
another ration card.

The family’s sister, Eva (Ingetraud
Hinze) spends most of her nights, with another woman living in the same
building, at bars, where she pawns free cigarettes, drinks, and whatever else
she might come across—although she refuses to engage in prostitution, which at
least might have put more food into their mouths.

So it is up to Edmund to forage for a few
potatoes, a couple cans of processed meat, and whatever else he might get for
selling a neighbor’s scale or a former teacher’s record of an Adolph Hitler
speech—played loudly on a record player to the very citizens who have been destroyed
by its propaganda—to British or American soldiers.

While children of the same age are seen
playing soccer and other games, Edmund, unwelcome to join in their games,
carries around his satchel as if he were wearing the weight of the earth on his
shoulders, which, symbolically, he is. For him, and dozens like him, there is no
childhood to be had. A former teacher, Henning, clearly a pedophile, living in
a house of like-minded men, fondles him while demanding he sell the Hitler
record, another of residents hovering nearby if Edmund might escape Henning’s
clutches. The sexually innocent escapes the ordeal with ten marks for his sale,
but another girl, Christl, hardly older than he, seems to have sexually hooked
up with a gang-leader who offers subway customers perfumes with nothing inside,
grabbing the money from the hands of any girl who might be tempted to buy.

If Henning cannot get into his shorts, he
does get into Edmund’s head, with his message of the survival of the fittest;
in a world which is literally playing out this concept, is it any wonder that
Edmund determines to act, stealing a bottle of poison and offering it up to his
dying father with his tea. In doing this, of course, Edmund, himself, stands in
for the millions of regular German citizens who willingly went along with Nazi
dogma; yet Rossellini is perhaps also suggesting that it is necessary that the
young should quickly do away with the old if a new Germany is to survive. In
the war-torn Berlin of this film there is no room for niceties, and Edmund’s
schoolteacher’s lessons have relevance for such an exhausted child.

Yet, Edmund also does represent a
cultural shift, if only in the guilt for having accomplished the act. He
attempts to find Christl to confess his action; but she, having now moved on to others,
has no time for an innocent child. And when he returns to Henning, we see the
pedophile with an even younger boy in tow, about to commit his dreadful act,
who has no time for Edmund. When he momentarily turns to talk to Edmund, the
elderly pedophile neighbor quickly scoops up the chick. When Edmund confesses
to Henning, the dreadful monster pretends shock, reminding one a bit like the
James Stewart character in Hitchcock’s Rope,
when confronted by his former students’ murder of a peer. But Henning seemingly
relents if only Edmund might let him grasp him in perverse forgiveness. The
boy, understandably, runs off in horror, without even comprehending, surely,
the nature of his schoolteacher’s pretended succor.

The child who is no longer a child
watches others at play, but unable to join it, kicks a rock down the street as
if playing kick-the-can, wandering up into the bombed-out ruins of his own
apartment building. Below he watches as a truck takes away his father’s coffin,
along with many others it has collected en
masse. For a moment the boy covers his eyes as if he has seen too much. And before the viewer can even imagine what is
going through his mind, he jumps to his death.

Even the future, so Rossellini suggests,
is in utter jeopardy. It is perhaps only those who no longer even attempt to
change their future who can survive, a kind of zombie culture that lives by
just hanging on.

If this film is sentimental, then I don’t
comprehend the meaning of that word. Melodramatic? Perhaps; it is an exaggerated
time that I feel Rossellini has so credulously captured on film.

Having seen Peter Brook’s play Battlefield, another post-holocaust
examination, just a few days earlier, I was reminded yet again of Beckett’s
words at the end of The Unnameable:
“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Perhaps, in the case of Germany, Year Zero it is only the most unfit who survive.